Rob Martin has thanked the rescue team he credits with saving his life after spending eight hours stranded on a six-inch ledge more than 10,000 feet up California’s Sierra Nevada.
Martin, an experienced climber, was scaling the Mendenhall Couloir on Laurel Mountain with a friend last Saturday when he veered off the established route. The gully he was attempting is known for steep sections and loose rock that frequently becomes unstable, and the area where he became trapped carried no route markers, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
The Mono County Search and Rescue team later explained the deadly terrain Martin had wandered into. “Traveling off-route quickly leads to increasingly vertical, un-protectable 5th-class terrain with no viable means of continuing either up or down,” the volunteers wrote in a Facebook post last weekend. “With thousands of feet of vertical exposure below, any fall would almost certainly be fatal.”
Rescuers were alerted by the sheriff’s office and spent roughly two hours searching without success. They finally located Martin after hearing his voice calling from the distance. When they found him, he was repeatedly shifting his weight from foot to foot, a sign that his legs had begun to cramp on the precarious perch.
“It was determined that, without intervention, a fatal fall was increasingly possible if the subject remained in place overnight,” the rescue team wrote.
Powerful winds made a helicopter hoist impossible, forcing the team to approach on foot through darkness with only headlamps to guide them. Rescuer Mitchell Quiring described the night approach to the Chronicle: “It was incredibly dangerous and a little scary moving around in the dead of night – everyone’s operating on pure trust. It’s navigable terrain during the day but it becomes unnavigable at night.”
Quiring said that leaving Martin until morning was not an option given his deteriorating condition. One rescuer eventually reached him from above and secured him to a rope system, eliminating the immediate risk of a fatal fall. By that point, Martin had already endured eight hours clinging to the cliff.
The entire rescue operation stretched across 15 hours, continuing into the early hours of Sunday morning before Martin was finally brought to safety.
Martin described his mental state during the ordeal in an interview. “A lot of scary thoughts. A lot of lonely thoughts. My hands were cramping. The feet were the hardest part, they’re only half of the ledge,” he said.
Quiring credited Martin’s own resilience for the successful outcome. “He did not give up, and that is really one of the biggest takeaways from this,” Quiring said. “This could have been a very different story if he didn’t push through the adversity.”
Martin directed his gratitude toward the team during his NBC News appearance. “My message to Mitch and his team is thank you for saving my life,” he said. “I would not be sitting here if it wasn’t for them and their sense of service.”